Every one of those hundred orators is to me a more fearful thought than that of a hundred men gathering samphire.  And when we take into account how large a portion of them (if the present mania hold) are likely to be commemorated in stone or some even more durable material, the conception is positively stunning.  Let us settle all scores by subscribing to a colossal statue of the late Town-Crier in bell-metal, with the inscription, “VOX ET PRAETEREA NIHIL,” as a comprehensive tribute to oratorical powers in general. He, at least, never betrayed his clients.  As it is, there is no end to it.  We are to set up Horatius Vir in effigy for inventing the Normal Schoolmaster, and by-and-by we shall be called on to do the same ill-turn for Elihu Mulciber for getting uselessly learned (as if any man had ideas enough for twenty languages!) without any schoolmaster at all.  We are the victims of a droll antithesis.  Daniel would not give in to Nebuchadnezzar’s taste in statuary, and we are called on to fall down and worship an image of Daniel which the Assyrian monarch would have gone to grass again sooner than have it in his back-parlor.  I do not think lions are agreeable, especially the shaved-poodle variety one is so apt to encounter;—­I met one once at an evening party.  But I would be thrown into a den of them rather than sleep in the same room with that statue.  Posterity will think we cut pretty figures indeed in the monumental line!  Perhaps there is a gleam of hope and a symptom of convalescence in the fact that the Prince of Wales, during his late visit, got off without a single speech.  The cheerful hospitalities of Mount Auburn were offered to him, as to all distinguished strangers, but nothing more melancholy.  In his case I doubt the expediency of the omission.  Had we set a score or two of orators on him and his suite, it would have given them a more intimidating notion of the offensive powers of the country than West Point and all the Navy-Yards put together.

In the name of our common humanity, consider, too, what shifts our friends in the sculpin line (as we should call them in Chesumpscot) are put to for originality of design, and what the country has to pay for it.  The Clark Mills (that turns out equestrian statues as the Stark Mills do calico-patterns) has pocketed fifty thousand dollars for making a very dead bronze horse stand on his hind-legs.  For twenty-five cents I have seen a man at the circus do something more wonderful,—­make a very living bay horse dance a redowa round the amphitheatre on his (it occurs to me that hind-legs is indelicate) posterior extremities to the wayward music of an out-of-town (Scotice, out-o’-toon) band.  Now, I will make a handsome offer to the public.  I propose for twenty-five thousand dollars to suppress my design for an equestrian statue of a distinguished general officer as he would have appeared at the Battle of Buena Vista.  This monument is intended as a weathercock to crown the new dome of the Capitol